Whole psychology

• Conformity


  • Internalization - changing your beliefs or behavior to fit a wider social group because you've internalized those beliefs or behavioral norms and think genuinely that they are your own
  • Compliance - aligning your behavior to fit the wider social group despite your own private doubts out of a desire to fit in or out of a fear of being rejected
  • Identification - changing your behavior to fit a set of social norms usually associated with a specific role or position within society
• Informational social influence (ISI)


  Conforming and changing your behavior based on information gained from or about the wider social group
• Normative social influence (NSI)


  Conforming or changing your behavior based on apparent and obvious social norms and expected behavior from the wider social group
• Sheriff's 1935 study looked into conformity and informational social influence
• Sheriff's study procedure


  1. Participants tested individually first

  2. Participants tested in groups

  3. Participants tested individually again
• Participants converged towards the mean when tested in groups, showing informational social influence
• Sheriff's study had good control of variables but limited ecological validity and ethical issues
• Asch's 1951 study looked into normative social influence
• Asch's study procedure


  1. Participants placed in groups of 8 with 7 confederates

  2. Confederates gave deliberately wrong answers

  3. Real participants gave wrong answers 32% of the time
• Asch's study also had good control of variables but limited ecological validity and ethical issues
• Situational factors influencing conformity

  • Group size
  • Social support
  • Task difficulty
• Dispositional factors influencing conformity

  • Gender
  • Experience and expertise
• Social role


  A position within society that carries a given set of expected behaviors and social norms
• The Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) investigated conformity to social roles
• The SPE had severe ethical issues and was never precisely replicated
• Orlando's 1973 study also investigated conformity to social roles in a mock psychiatric ward
• Milgram's 1963 obedience experiments investigated why people obey authority figures
• Milgram's study procedure


  1. Participants instructed to deliver electric shocks to a learner

  2. Learner was actually a confederate

  3. All participants delivered shocks up to at least 300 volts
• Milgram's study had massive ethical issues and limited ecological validity
• Agentic state


  When someone feels they are acting on behalf of a higher responsibility which has issued the orders and will take responsibility for the actions
• Factors keeping someone in an agentic state

  • Reluctance to disrupt the experiment
  • Pressure of a grand and trusted surrounding
  • Pressure from the authority figure
• Authoritarian personality


  Some people have an authoritarian personality where they will obey the orders of their superiors and issue orders to their inferiors
• Factors making someone resistant to social influence

  • Social support
  • Internal locus of control
• Moscovici's 1969 study showed how a minority can influence a majority
• Factors increasing minority influence


  • Consistency
  • Flexibility
• Social impact theory outlined factors changing the extent of minority influence
• Conversion theory


  Members of the majority are converted to the minority view
• Factors that change how likely a minority is to influence a majority

  • Consistency - when a minority is consistent and unchanging it becomes more likely that members of the majority will be swayed or persuaded
  • Flexibility - when a minority is flexible and willing to compromise or alter their approach it becomes much more likely that they will change the mind of at least some of the majority
• Social impact theory


  • Strength - a stronger more vocal and more powerful minority is much more likely to influence the majority
  • Numbers - a numerically larger minority is much more influential than a numerically smaller minority
  • Immediacy - if a minority is close to a majority in terms of physical distance or personal relationships the influence of that minority increases
• When people in a group agree with the minority


  The minority starts to exert influence
• As more members of the majority start to agree with the minority


  The minority becomes the majority and the old majority becomes the new minority
• Examples of minorities becoming the majority

  • Civil rights in the U.S. - the idea of racial equality was a minority view until about the 1960s
  • Rights of LGBT people in the UK - for most people before the 1970s the very idea of homosexuality was repulsive and repugnant, this was a very majority view that was gradually changed by the actions of an immediate numerate vocal minority
• Sensory register


  Stores the information taken in by our various senses, can only store an extremely small and limited amount of information for a very small amount of time
• Short-term memory (STM)


  Stores information for a short amount of time, usually acoustically, has limited capacity and duration but larger than the sensory register
• Long-term memory (LTM)


  Stores information for a long period of time, has an infinite capacity and duration, divided into episodic, semantic and procedural memory
• Sperling experiment tested and provided evidence for the sensory register
• Peterson and Peterson experiment tested short-term memory duration and capacity
• Barrick et al. experiment tested long-term memory by asking participants to recall and match photographs of ex-classmates
• Jacob's experiment


  Investigated the ability of participants to recall strings of numbers and letters, found the average capacity of short-term memory was between 5 and 9 individual digits or letters
• Miller's magic number


  Short-term memory capacity of 7 units of information plus or minus 2